'Six,' Broadway musical starring Henry VIII's wives, ruled by queen power

The Queens are coming to East Lansing on Tuesday ready to make history shake and shimmer with a heavy injection of diva delight.

The show is “Six,” the Broadway spectacle touring through Wharton Center from May 14-19. The eponymous number refers to the benighted wives of Henry VII. According to the British rhyme taught to schoolchildren to help them remember each of queens’ fates, they were “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.”

In “Six,” the queens fight to take back their story, to be something more than some man’s ex-wives. They’ve gathered to form a girl band and they compete for the position of frontwoman, which will be given to whomever had it worst with Henry.

The show, co-directed by Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage, famously closed on its opening Broadway night because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It would come back to win 23 awards in the 2021-2022 Broadway season, including a Tony for Best Original Score.

A month ago, Danielle Mendoza joined the North American national tour, reuniting with a show with which she has great familiarity. She is the only actor to have snagged permanent roles in “Six” as two different queens. Now playing Anna of Cleves, she was Anne Boleyn on a cruise ship for six months in 2022.

However, her connection with the show dates back further. During the pandemic, she and her friends created a social media tribute to the show to while away the isolation hours.

“A bunch of my friends and I did covers of the whole album during the pandemic as a passion project,” Mendoza said. “I was the musical director and so I learned everybody’s parts.”

It would serve her well when she auditioned for "Six."

“It was from (that project) that it kind of manifested itself, which was insane,” Mendoza said. “For me to audition for it and be seen for it — but for that project, I saw myself as Parr and my friends saw me as Parr, so it was crazy to get Boleyn after that. I was so intimidated.”

Each queen has a solo done in the style of a pop diva. Boleyn’s number is one of the best known, “Don’t Lose Ur Head,” done in the style of such artists as Miley Cyrus, Avril Lavigne and Lily Allen.

“Every one of the queens are so special,” Mendoza said. “Their sound, their personality, their songs — every one of them is a challenge in their own. In my dream plan, I would be open to any of the queens.”

Mendoza soon found herself getting into the personality of Boleyn and is now enjoying the complete contrast of Cleves, whose sound is modeled on Nicki Minaj and Rihanna.

“For Boleyn, she’s just such a strong character and she’s arguably the most well-known out of the queens." Mendoza said. "That’s why I was so intimidated to play it. She’s strong and fierce and that’s what I admired about her. Boleyn really has to be on top of her stuff because she interjects so much. Cleves has a different challenge in which she has to be really aware of the audience.”

Every night, the actor playing Cleves picks someone in the audience to join them on stage in a dance. Mendoza said she’s always watching the audience and trying to evaluate who would have the most fun with the audience participation.

While Boleyn’s personality was intimidating at first, the pressure with Cleves came in a different form, one that sprang from Mendoza being the first Asian or Filipino to take on the role.

“I had expectations of what I thought were supposed to be Anna’s characteristics, sounds or even movements that I thought I couldn’t produce comfortably in my body,” Mendoza said. “What’s been great is accepting that casting chose me for a reason and that I can be a version of Anna of Cleves that is completely acceptable and loved and still relatable and valid. With the help of the director and all the choreographers who came in from London, I got through that and found my own movement that felt natural to bring on stage.”

Boleyn and Cleves present a contrast in personalities.

“(Cleves) is a cool girl. She’s the hype girl, which is different from Boleyn who is a little chattier and competitive,” Mendoza said. “It’s been really nice to change the mood completely. She definitely has more of the personality I would like to be in real life — more carefree, more living life.”

Historically, Cleves had one of the shortest marriages to Henry. Henry had sent a portrait artist to paint her and her sister when he was shopping for wife number 4. When she arrived on British shores, he complained that she didn’t look like her portrait, but it was too late to cancel what was a political wedding.

Despite the failed marriage, they remained friends and he gifted her with a castle and a substantial income. She is the only queen buried in Westminster.

“She managed to dodge the bullet with Henry,” Mendoza said. “Their meeting was not ideal. He was a big prankster and she didn’t appreciate that. Her biggest success was to manage to get such a good deal and to be friends with Henry. She successfully negotiated all of these riches to herself. You have to be intelligent to be able to do that with the king.”

Mendoza relishes the differences of performing the show on land versus on the cruise ships where they would sometimes have only 45 minutes between performances in a show that is high energy with everyone on stage nearly the entire time. Mendoza said each queen gets less than 30 seconds off stage in which they can drink some water and pat down the sweat.

“We had wonderful audiences on the ships and people knew the show, but there’s definitely a difference on land where they really, really know the show,” Mendoza said. “We have fans who sometimes give us a gift, we have the opportunity to interact with them at the stage door, which is a really nice thing. It’s much more personal on tour which I really enjoy.”

“Six” is a celebration of Henry’s ex-wives in a way that rewrites history. It’s not meant to be an academic lesson, but rather an exploration of the way women get treated and treat each other. It invites audiences to imagine how things might be different.

“It’s a fun, entertaining show,” Mendoza said. “It’s not necessarily 100 percent true, but it is about women empowerment and supporting each other. A huge theme for us is fixing each other’s crowns and I think that’s so applicable with today’s society. In social media, it’s so easy to compare ourselves and get bogged down by it. But if we can find a way to notice all the hard work that everyone’s doing and lift each other up, instead of seeing it as a competition, (then we) get elevated.”